I’m in a Perkins in Elkhart, and I’ve barely seen anything here, but it’s all very weird. Let me see how much I can explain before my food arrives.

I left Elkhart, or at least stopped calling it my home, when? 1989, when I graduated and went to college? 1991-ish, when I returned the second time and vowed to never come back? 1995, when I moved to Seattle? I don’t know. But I guess the 1991 date is when I stopped spending any regular amount of time here. And I haven’t set foot in Indiana since 2004, partly by coincidence, and partly by design. So it’s been long enough to make it seem like an alien experience when I return.

I got into O’Hare and got my rental car by about midnight last night, then pointed it east and headed toward the toll road, hoping I could still figure out my way around Chicago and to Indiana with no major incident. The toll road was eerie, driving with nobody around, counting the exits and wishing I could go to bed.

Right after the University Park Mall zipped past, I exited on 331, and took the route home I’d normally take from the UP mall, on Cleveland road. The second I pulled up to a railroad crossing, the gates went down and a 200-car train inched by. I joked about this in Summer Rain, but it really happens to me every time I get here.

I drove down this stretch of road with only farmland on either side, and remarkably it was still farm. I used to max out my car here late at night, because there are no intersections for miles. Then my friend Peter got killed there in 1991, so I stopped. The old drive-in movie theater - a gas station, and what looks like a Super Target or a Wal-Mart going in. The Pleasureland Museum - still there, but I couldn’t tell if it was closed or not.

Nothing really changes in Elkhart. A lot of the same businesses had the same signs that they did in 1985, the same displays, the same paintjobs. They build new subdivisions of prefab houses in the outlying areas: Goshen, Napanee, Granger, Simoton Lake. But they’re the same subdivisions they built in Dunlap in the 70s, just different trim and formica and sunroom options. And when they build a newer and more expensive and further out subdivision, it means the old ones won’t get updated and won’t get redone and essentially get trapped in time, to wear their 1970s aluminum siding forever.

Some stores go under. The old Templin’s music, where I bought many a pair of guitar strings in the day, is now a Mexican furniture store. The Taco Bell where I worked is now a crack Chinese place. I used to spend a lot of time at this Perkins, but back in 1989, it was a few blocks south, and the last-gen design of Perkins buildings. The new one is nice, but it isn’t the old one. (This one is currently filled with a gaggle of high school girls basketball players, which might be enticing to jailbait enthusiasts. As for myself, it sort of freaks me out that they were born after the last time I was in a Perkins.)

I thought Denver was a bit conservative, but this place makes it look like a hippy ashram chanting in a drum circle. Two out of three cars have this Jesus license plate that you can tell was designed in spite when the JFreaks here lost that ACLU case about the ten commandments. There are are churches everywhere. The Concord Mall now has a sign that says “Great Deals, Family Values.” (Does that mean you can’t sodomize the workers at Pretzel Time anymore?) This is the one place in the country where I feel Nicole Ritchie thin. When I walked out of the hotel, there were about two dozen people chain-smoking like you’d suck on a bottle of oxygen if your spacesuit exploded and you hadn’t breathed in five minutes. Lots of magnetic ribbons, and I haven’t seen a single Kerry/Edwards or anti-Bush sticker yet.

I saw both “de-malled” malls, Pierre Moran and Scottsdale. Back in the old days, they turned strip malls into malls by enclosing them. For whatever random reason (*cough*Wal-Mart) malls have gone into the toilet, so someone got the wise idea to break apart the interior spaces, and turn them into a huge parking lot with a bunch of freestanding big-box stores. This makes it much easier to shop, because you have to either move your car six times, or carry a lot of stuff in the rain and snow. Both malls look even more deserted, but it’s obviously some liberal conspiracy and we all need to pray to Jesus to make sure the local Panera and Dress Barn keep in the black. (Wait, I mean they are making money, not that we want african-americans shopping there.)

The biggest change I see is that all of the trees have doubled and tripled in size. When I drive by an old dentist or insurance agent and see a giant oak stretching way into the sky, I remember when it used to be as tall as me. Driving past houses and streets, it seems like I have the angles and distances and setbacks burned into my brain. When I cross Prarie on Mishawaka, I know in my head exactly how far it is to the u-pick strawberry place, even if it was plowed under and turned into a medical clinic. The occasional bodega where a video store used to be throws me off but it’s usually in the same building, just a different sign.

I spent the day with my sister, nephew, and niece. It was the first time I’ve ever seen Belle, and she is already mobile and stealing her brother’s toys at any possible chance. I always think the kids are cute, until a few hours later when Wesley runs down a row of toy trucks in Target and presses the sound button on every single one two dozen times, producing this cacophony of sirens and explosions and jackhammers, and I realize there’s no way I could do it for five days, let alone 18 years.

Not making much progress on this food - I better shut down and go back to my little Holiday Inn Express and see if the TV channels are just as bad as they were 30 years ago.

P.S. The waitress handed me my check and it said, in giant, curvy, girly cursive, “God Bless!” at the bottom. I still gave her a tip.

P.P.S. Re my previous entry about thunderstorms - I am back at my hotel, and just saw the most monumental t-storm I’ve seen in a while. Very close strikes, loud as hell booms, and the kind of bolts that arc from sky to ground (okay, vice-versa) in such a way that make them look like scratches etched into a tinted window. There was even a five-second power outage that really reminded me I was in Indiana.

So we saw two of the four Cubs-Rockies games this weekend: on Thursday, the Cubs won, and on Sunday, the Rockies. We had tickets to go to Saturday’s game. but after Thursday, we didn’t think we could stomach being in a section with 100 Cubs fans at a thing called “Cubsapalooza”. It turned out, however, to be “Cubsalosea”, with a wildly lopsided victory, and Jamie Carroll’s first grand slam. Anyway, I have nothing against Cubs fans, except that I really wanted to like the Cubs as a kid, and they repeatedly broke my heart. They play much better now, but it’s always hard to go back.

Speaking of going back, I am scheduled to make a trip to Indiana tomorrow. I say scheduled because I have no idea if we’re going to make it or not due to Sarah’s client at work completely flaking out. There are various scenarios that might play out: the trip goes as scheduled; I go tomorrow, Sarah meets me on Friday; we both come out on Friday; we reschedule a few weeks later; we move to Pakistan and leave no forwarding address. And I haven’t mentioned this trip here for various political reasons, one being that I will be in Elkhart for three or four days and I already have like 17 days of meetings requested and/or scheduled, and none of that includes seeing friends or doing something that’s actually vacation-like. (Not that there’s anything vacation-like in Elkhart. There is the Elkhart drinking game, where you drive around town, and every time you see a business you remember from childhood that has gone bankrupt and turned into a Mexican grocery store, you take a shot, and in about 15 minutes you die of alcohol poisoning.)

Believe it or not though, I do have some kind of sick fascination with Elkhart, because it’s really a fly trapped in amber. Every time I go back, I find I can still drive everywhere without even thinking of it. And there’s never anyone there when I drive around during the day. It’s like visiting the ruins of a city that was knocked out by a Neutron bomb. And I guess some of the fascination is that I have not been there for three years, and after an hour of driving around, I will be bored out of my fucking mind. But I also realize that I have almost no pictures of Elkhart, and I’d really like to drive around with my new (as of 2005) camera and get some good shots of the desolation. I always liked elkhartsucks.com, but it is dead and gone, so maybe I need to create my own version. (And I will turn on comments on pages so Larry has something to do at work.)

And I guess I think a lot of the summer between high school and college, and how it was 18 years ago, which is half of my lifetime now. Having a car now, and having an iPod that has all of my old music on it sometimes reminds me of that period. And almost all of it was in Elkhart, and it brings back thoughts of that time. And to be truthful, I did a lot of stupid shit back then, and probably the stupidest thing was getting involved with the girl that I dated right before I left for school, and the ensuing breakup. But with some distance, those thoughts are interesting. I always thought about writing a fictionalized book of that era of my life, and I made a couple of false starts, but I now realize I can’t write stuff like that anymore. The second you finish writing a book about someone that fucked you over in life, their lawyer contacts you. (See also Augustin Burroughs, although maybe you need to make a hundred million dollars for this rule to come into play.)

Christ, it’s almost eleven and I haven’t even started writing yet.

The Rockies-Brewers game yesterday wasn’t even funny in its cruelty. This one doesn’t even deserve the bulleted list. Basically, the Rockies drove in 8 runs by the bottom of the 2nd, including a 2nd inning of 7 runs that seemed like it would never end. The bases got loaded, and then it was doubles and triples and homers, and all of these people kept running in, and it was like the beaches of Normandy for the Brewers. The third inning: three more. The fourth inning: five more. Tony Graffanino, the Brewers’ star second baseman, jumped for a catch and tore out his knee. And the Brewers went through every single pitcher they had there. Yost seriously almost had to get a position player to pitch the 8th and 9th inning, which would be interesting from the freak anomaly standpoint. The game ended at 19-4. It was funny, one of the announcers on the radio said “the Brewers are down two touchdowns now” and the other said “it’s like the score to a Broncos-Packers game”.

In other weirdness, that pitch that hit Jason Hirsch in the leg in the first inning yesterday, it turns out it BROKE his leg. And he pitched six innings. That’s pretty hardcore.

Pictures, soon, whenever I get around to captioning them. Brooms galore. I also found a new place to eat at the ballpark, there is this cluster of shops hidden behind a tavern that have a lot of non-ballpark food like deli sandwiches and gourmet pizzas that aren’t rubbery Papa John’s personal pan things. Yesterday I cheated though, and bought a bunch of sodas and water from the vending machine in my building at $1.25 each instead of $5.75 each, and then put an icepack in my bag. Worked fine, even in the 95 degree heat.

Three Cubs games this weekend, and I can’t even remember what’s going on besides baseball. I am trying to write on this book, and it is going somewhat. And the zine, it’s in stasis until I get a couple of bios and releases from people. The layout is pretty close though. And the artwork is on its way. I hope to get it to the printer in another week or two. Or three. We’ll see.

OK, on to that writing.

I didn’t plan it, but we went to the Rockies-Brewers game last night. Sarah got tickets from work, and she had to miss Monday’s game, so we went last night. Here’s the details:

• We were in section 133, row 27,seats 1+2. That’s on the floor, behind home plate, about two sections in from where the screen starts on the left, and about halfway back. Pretty damn close, and the first time I’ve sat in the infield box in a night game.
• The screen messed up my use of binoculars for the most part. And my battery charger fucked up, so my camera was non-operational.
• Remember yesterday how I said I never wanted to get a hot dog again? It was dollar hot dog night. I passed this up and got a bratwurst, but that didn’t go so well.
• Jason Hirsh was back on the mound after a very bad sprain of his left leg. So the second Brewers batter line drives it right into the same leg. Every medical professional in the state of Colorado is suddenly on the field, and I seriously thought they were going to take him off on a stretcher. But he walked it off, took a couple of test pitches, and was fine.
• Ed Bellorin is a catcher that spent nine years in the minors, and got moved up from AAA to the Rockies to play his first major-league game that night. (Ianetta got sent down, because he can’t bat for shit these days.) In the second inning, he jammed his leg and ended his ML start with a blown hamstring. That sucks.
• Slow game, but by the middle of the sixth, it was 3-0 Brewers, and it looked like they’d lock it up.
• I go to take a piss. The Rockies hit a homer and two singles before I’m able to finish. I go to buy some nachos. The stupid bitch at the register takes 45 minutes examining someone’s ID, and the guy behind the counter doesn’t understand English and I’m screaming “NACHOS NACHOS NACHOS YOU STUPID FUCK WHAT DO YOU THINK I’M TRYING TO GET MY PASSPORT RENEWED JUST GIVE ME THE FUCKING NACHOS NOW!” By the time I get back to my seat, Garret Atkins singles and it’s now 3-2.
• Pitching change. Double. Intentional walk of Brad Hawpe. Single. Everyone is total apeshit. Couple of outs. Five runs in one inning, three while I’m at the urinal, and it’s 5-3.
• Todd Helton homers in the 7th. Hate the goatee, love the home runs.
• In the bottom of the 8th, the Rockies get in two runs because the ball went right through Prince Fielder’s hands; this was his second bone-headed error. To be fair, Holliday dropped the ball in a very obvious way twice that night. And as a side note, one of those resulted in a Prince Fielder triple. That dude is shorter than me and weighs about 50 pounds more, so it’s pretty amazing to see that he can walk, let alone run. It was hilarious.
• Todd Helton then hit another home run, driving in two other players, and making the score 11-3.
• Someone hit a foul back over the mesh and into the second deck, and a guy in the front row just quickly raised his bare hand and whap, caught it. It was the best fan catch I’ve ever seen, and it looked like he did it without thinking. Also, at some point, Jamie Carroll hit a foul ball very high in the third deck - it looked almost like it was going to go out. That was pretty cool.
• I believe the Brewers went through four or five pitchers, and their bullpen is already pretty fucked. Also, Jorje Julio pitched for the Rockies for the 8th, and that guy’s a demon - I think his slowest pitch was like 96 MPH.
• Before the 9th, they announced that Barry ‘Juice’ Bonds hit #756, and they showed the video on the screen. Every single person in the park was booing. I’m thinking of bringing a sign to the park today that says BARRY BONDS - 756*.
• In the top of the ninth, two doubles got the Brewers another run, but that was that. Final score: 11-4.

I have tickets a few sections over but in the same row for today’s 1

against the Brewers. Then tickets up in the 330s for the Cubs on Thu, Sat, and Sun. Lots of baseball. I need to invest in some better food to bring in with me, though.

Last night was the first home game in a series against the Brewers. Lazy as always, so here’s the bullet list:

• I felt slightly conflicted about the game when I bought tickets, because aside from the Rockies, I think the Brewers are my second-favorite team. And I now have a certain connection to Milwaukee, they have a great park, they are also somewhat of an underdog, and they have been doing well this year.
• The Brewers came off a brutal loss to the Phillies that burned through their entire bullpen, so their pitching was hurt. But, they have a hard-hitting offense, and at 5280 feet, that means home runs.
• No sausage race. No Bernie Brewer. No bratwurst, other than the crappy ones they sell at Coors Field. So that removes about 80% of the Brewers experience, unfortunately.
• It rained before the game, and looked pretty dreary outside, so I was fearful of even going. It was also much cooler than when I got rained on at the Phillies game, which would make it even worse. But it kept dry for the most part, aside from a sprinkle or two.
• There were only about 30,000 people there, which is probably the lowest attendance I’ve seen for a night game. Part of that was probably the rain, though.
• Every once in a while, I will smell a hot dog that someone else has, and think “damn, I need to get one too”, and when I do, it totally sucks. This happens pretty much every time I buy a hot dog at a baseball game. I will never learn.
• I was in section 332, the first row of the second part of the section. So I had a railing right in front of me, and I had to sit up to see over it. Otherwise, not bad seats.
• I bought a set of 10x50 binoculars, and those made things interesting. I didn’t mess with them during the game a lot, except to see who was warming up in the bullpen. But before the game, it was a good way to look into the dugout and how it was set up, and to see the players warming up. Like I saw Matsui’s translator with him on the field before he got started.
• Josh Fogg was the starting pitcher, and wasn’t throwing down major strikeouts, but he really had a way to keep the hits on the ground and very fieldable, which pretty much shut down the Brewers.
• Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun each had single homers, and both were pretty impressive. Fielder’s went into one of the exit ramps in right field, and this horde of people ran down the ramp, as it bounced and bounced away, which was funny to watch.
• In the first inning, Matsui almost hit a homer (hit right below the rail, then bounced out), and then Brad Hawpe hit a three-run homer. At this point, half the people there thought the game was over.
• In the second, Matt Holliday hit a two-run homer, and most of the people there thought the game was over.
• Nobody scored after Braun’s homer for the rest of the game, and it became one of those “who’s going to fuck up defensively and let the other team score nine runs” games, but it kept pretty tight.
• This Harley dealership does this stupid big-screen computer animated game with three pigs on bikes and you have to guess which one is going to win, and I swear at least half of the Brewers players were intently watching it to see which one would win.
• The “guess who said the quote” thing between innings was a Bob Eucker quote, and after they showed the answer, they showed a shot of Bob in the box, and that got more applause than anything else that night.
• The Rockies announcer always announces Matt Holliday’s name “Matt Hall-iday!” for some reason, and it always confused the fuck out of me because of Bill Hall of the Brewers, and I wondered what happened if they were both in one game. But it turns out the Brewers were keeping Hall out to give him some rest. He almost came in to pinch hit for Vargas, and was on deck, but it never happened.
• Fogg continued to pitch well all night, and had a very low pitch count. Vargas, not so much - I think he had one of the highest pitch counts of his career. He also had a fielding fuckup where someone hit a ball right at him, and he tried to catch it with his pitching hand, and it hit and went on to the shortstop. So he fucked the play, and his hand probably smarted a bit.
• In the 9th, it got really edgy. Then Troy Tulowitski had two majorly stupid errors. One, he pitched to first, but like twenty feet too high. The other, he tried to get to first instead of second on a double play and fucked it up. I am becoming more of a fan of his, because usually his fielding is excellent, but man he fucked up that inning.
• Final score: 6-2. Cubs fans rejoice, we cut down their lead for you.

Pictures, eh, eventually. Check the photo page.